“This conclusion received considerable support from a fact which I observed later, but mention in this place.  On examining the soles of the shoes taken from the dead man’s feet, I found only the ordinary mud of the streets.  There was no trace of the peculiar gravelly mud that adhered to my own boots and Jervis’s, and which came from the square of the inn.  Yet the porter distinctly stated that the deceased, after paying the rent, walked back towards his chambers across the square; the mud of which should, therefore, have been conspicuous on his shoes.

“Thus, in a moment, a wildly speculative hypothesis had assumed a high degree of probability.

“When Mr. Stephen was gone, Jervis and I looked over the chambers thoroughly; and then another curious fact came to light.  On the wall were a number of fine Japanese colour-prints, all of which showed recent damp-spots.  Now, apart from the consideration that Jeffrey, who had been at the trouble and expense of collecting these valuable prints, would hardly have allowed them to rot on his walls, there arose the question:  How came they to be damp?  There was a gas stove in the room, and a gas stove has at least the virtue of preserving a dry atmosphere.  It was winter weather, when the stove would naturally be pretty constantly alight.  How came the walls to be so damp?  The answer seemed to be that the stove had not been constantly alight, but had been lighted only occasionally.  This suggestion was borne out by a further examination of the rooms.  In the kitchen there were practically no stores and hardly any arrangements even for simple bachelor cooking; the bedroom offered the same suggestion; the soap in the wash-stand was shrivelled and cracked; there was no cast-off linen, and the shirts in the drawers, though clean, had the peculiar yellowish, faded appearance that linen acquires when long out of use.  In short, the rooms had the appearance of not having been lived in at all, but only visited at intervals.

“Against this view, however, was the statement of the night porter that he had often seen a light in Jeffrey’s sitting-room at one o’clock in the morning, with the apparent implication that it was then turned out.  Now a light may be left in an empty room, but its extinction implies the presence of some person to extinguish it; unless some automatic device be adopted for putting it out at a given time.  Such a device—­the alarm movement of a clock, for instance, with a suitable attachment—­is a simple enough matter, but my search of the rooms failed to discover anything of the kind.  However, when looking over the drawers in the bedroom, I came upon a large box that had held a considerable quantity of hard stearine candles.  There were only a few left, but a flat candlestick with numerous wick-ends in its socket accounted for the remainder.